Roma Foundation for Europe Warns: Social Democrats’ Alliance with the Far Right Puts Romania’s Two Million Roma at Direct Risk

Brussels/Bucharest, 28 April 2026 – The Roma Foundation for Europe today warned that Romania’s Social Democratic Party has crossed a line that no mainstream Romanian party has crossed in two decades, co-filing a no-confidence motion against the country’s pro-European coalition alongside the AUR—the Alliance for the Union of Romanians—a hard-nationalist movement whose programme explicitly excludes Roma from the Romanian nation. The move comes one month after the Party of European Socialists (PES) publicly opposed exactly this kind of cooperation. The democratic firewall, a political commitment sustained by every mainstream Romanian party since the far right’s rise and validated by every European institution evaluating Romania’s democratic standing, has been dismantled by the party that was supposed to hold it.

The consequences for Roma are concrete and immediate. Romania’s National Council for Combating Discrimination—the institution charged with adjudicating the conduct AUR practises and licenses—faces hostile redesign under any AUR-dependent coalition. Education desegregation commitments under Romania’s National Roma Strategy cannot survive a government that depends on the AUR’s tolerance for its existence. The €10 billion Recovery and Resilience Facility tranche, which carries Roma-related conditionalities, is now in the hands of a coalition aligned with the party that opposes them. Those conditionalities are no longer commitments. They are paper.

In their defence, the PSD has pointed to a 2021 vote of no confidence in which the USR (Save Romania Union) and the AUR acted in parallel. It’s true that a single tactical vote in opposition is not a governing alliance. But what the PSD has done this week creates a structural dependency—a coalition that requires the AUR’s cooperation to function and that cannot survive without it. Not all voices within the PSD supported the decision.

What makes this week’s move more significant beyond Romania is not its scale but its mechanism. The Social Democrats broke no law. They used the ordinary tools of parliamentary democracy to hand political leverage to a movement that explicitly targets a minority. Europe has no shortage of frameworks designed to defend democracy—but most are built to detect external pressure, not internal erosion dressed in procedural legitimacy.

The pattern is not without precedent: when the European People’s Party relied on AfD votes to pass migration legislation in the German Bundestag in 2025, it was widely recognised as the first significant breach of the democratic firewall at the EU level. What is happening in Romania is the same logic, applied by a party that sits in the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.

The European Commission must expand the scope of the European Democracy Shield—the EU’s framework for protecting democratic institutions and processes—to recognise the legitimisation of the far right through domestic parliamentary process as a democratic threat in its own right.

“The PES issued a statement opposing exactly this alliance. Romania’s Social Democrats ignored it and filed the motion anyway. The question now is whether European party solidarity means anything when it is tested—or only when it is convenient,” said Mensur Haliti.

The Roma Foundation for Europe calls on the PES, Romania’s pro-European parties and the European Commission to:

• The Party of European Socialists to move from statements to consequences—through suspended voting rights, formal censure, or equivalent internal costs—making clear that crossing this line carries a real price.
• Romania’s pro-European parties to refuse every coalition arrangement that requires AUR’s votes—including those that may appear attractive after a snap election or parliamentary reshuffle.
• The European Commission to enforce Roma-related conditionalities attached to Romania’s Recovery and Resilience Facility tranche without concession, and to expand the scope of the European Democracy Shield to address the legitimisation of the far right through domestic parliamentary process.